Before dressing them, we first draw them nude — As a young painter in Florence, Leonardo studied human anatomy primarily to improve his art. His forerunner as an artist-engineer, Leon Battista Alberti, had written that anatomical study was essential for an artist because properly depicting people and animals requires beginning with an understanding of their insides. “Isolate each bone…

A look at the classic drawing stripped down to its essence — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, born around 80 BC, served in the Roman army under Caesar and specialized in the design and construction of artillery machines. His duties took him to what are now Spain and France and as far away as North Africa. Vitruvius later became an architect and worked on…

Changing the encoded anonymity of the web — My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After 40 years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement. I do…

A conversation between Walter Isaacson and Karen DeSalvo —

How collaboration led to the digital revolution — and helped me write my book — An excerpt and essay drawn from The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or…

Stewart Brand, a subject of one of my excerpts here (https://medium.com/medium-long/e50f65132b55), read it and sent in comments and corrections, which I appreciate. Here they are.  — [From Walter Isaacson: For the full excerpt about Brand and the birth of the personal computer, see: https://medium.com/medium-long/e50f65132b55 . For another excerpt, on the birth of The Well and AOL, see https://medium.com/book-excerpts/b73f3288d4b5 Please feel free to put comments and corrections as notes in the margin.]